The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety

304 Pages·2014·2.46 MB·English

by  Alistair Heys

The Anatomy of Bloom
For Lauren
The Anatomy of Bloom
Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety
Alistair Heys
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Bloom’s Gnosis
1 The Scene of Instruction
2 Bloom and Derrida
3 Bloom and De Man
4 Bloom and New Historicism
5 Bloom and Judaism
6 Bloom and Protestantism
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Harold Bloom for granting me permission to quote from
his books. I should also like to thank Stephen Jones for allowing me to pursue
my research at the Beinecke Library. A big thank you must also go out to James
Prosek, Fred Burwick, and Jim McKusick. I cannot thank Vitana Kostadinova
and Vadim Banev enough; a more circumspect thank you is directed to Jonathan
Bate. I thank my parents for their support, while many thanks should be
expressed toward Alan Rawes, Philip Shaw, Bernard Beatty, Jonathan Shears,
Emily Bernhardt Jackson, and Michael O’Neill. Rebecca Ferguson, Lyudmilla
Kostova, and Marilyn Gaull are most worthy of commendations, as is Agatha
Bielik-Robson. Haaris Naqvi, James Tupper, and Grishma Fredric deserve the
biggest thanks of all.
Preface
“What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper, “you are
insatiable”. “Everyone strives to attain the Law”, answers the man, “how
does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking
admittance but me?” The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of
his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: “No one
but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended
only for you. I am now going to shut it”.
Franz Kafka
Then one day I reached those city gates where angels are servants, where
planets and stars are slaves, a garden of roses and pines girded round with
walls of emerald and jasper trees, set in a desert of gold embroidered silk, its
springs sweet as honey, the river of paradise: a city which only virtue can
aspire to reach, a city whose cypresses are like the sabres of intellect, a city
whose sages wear brocaded robes of woven silk. And here before these gates
my reason spoke: “here within these walls, find what you seek and do not
leave without it”. So I approached the guardian of the gate, and told him of
my search. “Rejoice”, he answered, “your mine has produced a jewel, for
beneath this land of Truth there flows a crystal ocean of precious pearls and
pure clear water. This is the lofty sphere of exalted stars; aye it is paradise
itself, the abode of houris”.
Nasir Khusraw
William Bradford describes the Pilgrim Fathers as quieted spirits; his Of
Plymouth Plantation lies at the beginning of American history. The quietude of
the Pilgrims figures an instant of repose, when the power and grandeur of their
Atlantic crossing, if you will, their shooting of the gulf, their darting of an aim,
had been accomplished. This quietus constitutes a provocative place to start my
book because it reminds of the very passage that first inspired Harold Bloom to
play Plotinus to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Plato. The Emersonian clinamen away
from Europe represents the origin of a significant portion of Bloom’s rhetoric but
I wish to suggest that the latter’s belief that Emerson founds an American
religion adumbrates the limit of Bloom’s opacity, the flaw in his gem of
transparency. To comprehend why requires a short introductory examination of
Bloom’s treatment of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, in order to
demonstrate the importance of the figure of iconoclasm in his work. Therefore, I
want to contrast Bradford’s pacific pilgrims with the iconoclastic disquiet of
later arrivals, who felt cramped under theocracy and, as W. C. Martyn
underlines, “sustained with intense fanaticism the paramount authority of private
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judgment.”
Martyn records that the settlers would not let “I would” wait upon “I dare
not,” a phrase that has unexpectedly pacifistic connotations. I write this because
a most truculent passivity is to be found in the aftermath of the English
Revolution and in chiasmus that saw George Fox swap the Lion’s war of
Cromwell for the Lamb’s war of meekness. Stephen Marx outlines that, while
the founding father of the Quaker movement began a covenant of peace, he
advocated speaking truth to power: “In 1654 Fox wrote to Cromwell, ‘My
weapons are not carnal but spiritual and “my kingdom is not of this world,”
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therefore with a carnal weapon I do not fight’. ” The figure of peaceful
rebelliousness is one that teases Bloom in this meditation upon Ahab’s war-like
vitality, “There has to be . . . some peculiar inverse ratio between the trope of
whiteness in this book and the horrible paradox that these killers—including the
gentle Starbuck, still the best lance out of Nantucket . . . and the fearful Ahab—
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are Quakers: opposed to war, to this day, opposed to conscription.” A potential
answer to Bloom’s conundrum is provided in Abiezer Coppe’s visionary Fiery
Flying Rolls where the carnal room of the body is progressively depopulated of
temptations: “Upon this the life was taken out of the body (for a season) and it